Honestly, I think I'll take 'average' php code over 'average' .NET code, I just did a 18 mo. stint at a .NET enterprise environment after 8+ yrs of PHP(Drupal, so maybe the bar is higher, not saying it is, but maybe).
I don't have any substantive evidence for this, but I suspect you'd see very different characteristics among people who work on SharePoint and, say, MVC/WebAPI.
Vastly. People who develop sharepoint tend business focused people or ex IT people.
People who develop in MVC tend to be developers.
That explains why all the information you can find about SharePoint development is so muddled I guess.
I started out as a PHP web developer and started developing in .NET when it was released. At this stage, I've been developing applications in .NET for 15 years. Whenever I have to look at a PHP project or ASP classic project, the code quality is usually much worse than other languages. ASP and PHP make it really, really easy to do things wrong.
How can that be any worse than the average quality of sharepoint code?
Static typing and C# disallow many of the typical PHP code patterns I have seen in the wild.
There are a lot of creative ways around strict typing in c#, I spend my days dealing with them. I just finished working on a section that managed to combine the speed of c# with the expressiveness of assembly...